In 1956, Benjamin Bloom created a framework that would help educators focus on the intellectual comprehension of their students. The taxonomy provides a hierarchy of perception levels and is used for creating performance assignments and ensuring feedback from students (Churches, 2009).
The taxonomy features three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor, each further subdivided into categories. Since Bloom concentrated on the first one (see Table 2), the other two were developed by his successors. Usually, the following levels are identified (Pierre & Oughton, 2007):
Table 1.
As far as its relation to the audience is concerned, the taxonomy was traditionally perceived as a tool for the earlier years of school education. However, it has been revised and has become more universal for application at primary, secondary, and even tertiary levels. Thus, the target audience has broadened significantly (Rupani & Bhutto, 2011).
As far as curriculum planning is concerned, the implications run as follows:
- the taxonomy provides a strategy for developing any kind of educational content;
- it assists in mapping the purpose of the curriculum to the assignments that students should perform;
- it guides in improving cognitive skills for the elaboration of critical and creative thinking;
- it is used for making projects that require the collaboration of all reflection levels (Churches, 2009).
Table 2. Cognitive Domain (Churches, 2009).
References
Churches, A. (2009). Bloom’s digital taxonomy. Educational origami, 4(1), 1-44.
Pierre, E., & Oughton, J. (2007). The affective domain: undiscovered country. College Quarterly, 10(4), 1-7.
Rupani, C. M., & Bhutto, M. I. (2011). Evaluation of existing teaching-learning process on Bloom’s Taxonomy. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, pp. 119-128.